


Thereto I plight thee my troth

by azarias



Category: Black Sails
Genre: F/M, Hair Brushing, Mixed-Orientation Marriage, Mutual Masturbation, Pre-Slash, comparing notes, envy - Freeform, het in only the most technical sense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-19
Updated: 2017-03-19
Packaged: 2018-10-07 14:08:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10362177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azarias/pseuds/azarias
Summary: Thomas consults Miranda on the subject of his military liaison. Sexily.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Beta thanks as usual to [Rahne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thetrickisnotminding), who tackles my most Germanic sentences with aplomb. Additional thanks to Vertel for the POV check.

It was late when Thomas returned home, and later when he made his way to his wife's rooms. 

He knocked: an announcement, not a request. When he opened the door, he heard Miranda's maid gasp and saw her jerk back, looking for all the world like a thief caught with her hands on the silver, not a rose-cheeked Scots lass guilty only of brushing her mistress's hair. Eyes wide, she clasped the brush to her chest, the picture of a martyr holding the holy cross amidst the flames.

His damned brain amended her cap to a halo and dressed himself as, oh, Pontius Pilate, toga and all, and Thomas giggled. He was, perhaps, slightly drunk.

Miranda caught his eye in her looking glass, one eyebrow raised.

Thomas enunciated carefully, "Good evening, wife."

"Good evening, husband," Miranda said to the looking glass. She reached for one of the innumerable little vials and pots on her dressing table. In her shift and a robe of purple silk, with her hair half-undone and her cosmetics in front of her, expensive candles burning, she looked a proper wife for Pilate.

Thomas asked the maid, "Give us the room, please."

The girl hesitated, looking to Miranda. "That will be all for tonight, Bess," Miranda said.

The girl stayed still, though her voice quavered. "Are you certain, ma'am? Your hair --"

Miranda nodded, but gave her a kind pat on the wrist and took the brush. Bess bobbed a curtsey aimed halfway between master and mistress, and skirted past him as she left the room and closed the door behind.

"Poor, brave girl," Miranda murmured, turning in her seat to regard him. "She's still settling in. She thinks you've come to beat me."

"And should I beat you?" Thomas asked. He crossed the room, quite steady, and stood behind her, running his knuckles down one of her loose tresses. "Have you done something to deserve it?"

Miranda laughed, light and easy. "Oh, certainly, if you had any sense."

He bent and kissed her cheek, lingering a moment to breathe in the lavender and bergamot perfume that clung to her. "It's a good thing I was born a fool, then," he confided while he nuzzled her ear. "I'd wear out every whip in the stables, and at the end I'd still have a willful wife, and no time for any other work."

His willful wife made a content noise and tilted her head, inviting him to her neck. He kissed her there, just where her heartbeat fluttered against his lips, but stood again and took the hairbrush from her table. By candlelight her dark hair glistened, shadows somehow reflecting light. His turn to sigh, content. Slightly too much wine ran syrupy through his veins, and all the world around him felt warm, comfortably close. The soft, fine texture of her hair against his fingers was as good as a lover's caress. 

With one hand, he found the pins in her hair by feel and pulled them out; with the other he separated the locks and smoothed them down her back, careful to keep them from tangling. Through the watery lens of insobriety, every touch felt magnified, the ghost of a warm hand running down his spine even as he petted her. Miranda made a low noise, gratified, and let her head hang forward over her folded hands.

The susurration of the bristles as he pulled the brush through her hair, the whispered crackle of the candles, and their own breathing were the only sounds in the room. At this time of night, even London was quiet.

He groomed her, hypnotized, watching the strands pull straight beneath his hand and spring back to thick waves as soon as the brush lifted. When all her hair shone bright as the silk gown about her shoulders, he lay the brush down and simply stroked from her brow to the tips of her hair, again and again. Her dark eyes looked at him in the mirror, lambent and deep. 

"So how was it?" he asked finally, when all the warmth of the room had settled in his very bones.

"Lovely. We viewed the Greys' collection and then called on Lady Harington. Her youngest daughter is coming out this year, and I thought I'd put in a good word for the Lieutenant. An officer with his prospects isn't a bad catch for the third daughter of a baronet." Miranda's eyes were merry, a smile barely restrained from taking over her lips.

"You are an absolutely awful liar, my love."

She turned those wicked eyes on him, and her smile bloomed. "I fucked him in the carriage."

Until the day he died, may it never cease to delight him to hear _fuck_ come coarse and wanton from his wife's genteel lips.

He knelt down beside her, her bench seat high enough her head was barely above his. "In the carriage, you wild creature?" he asked, feigning shock. "There in the streets, with people passing by?"

Miranda nodded, eager to share her tale. "I had to. He's a very difficult man, your Lieutenant. If I had let him get his feet on the ground again, he was determined to deliver me safely home." Her long fingers touched his jaw, tilted his face, and made sure he was following her every word. "For a moment I thought he might bundle me up in my own cloak and carry me in like Cleopatra, to make sure I didn't fight. He is so _very_ strong, he could have done it."

A sharp breath and Thomas swallowed, nodding. He'd felt James's hands on him many times already -- just a handclasp or a quick squeeze to his shoulder, a guiding hand on his back. Only friendship, all Thomas could expect. But those hands were so strong and capable, always in motion, so expressive that James had to hide them behind his back to keep them from betraying his thoughts.

Could Thomas be blamed if sometimes he looked at James's hands and yearned for more? And here she was, the person most dear to him, who just today had been held in James's hands while his cock pierced her cunt. 

Thomas leaned into her touch, his mouth parted, tongue wetting his suddenly dry lips. "Was he gentle?" he asked. 

Of course James would be gentle. He was so very buttoned up, so very proper, and even with Miranda's talented hands rousing his passions, he would not forget himself. Not at first.

"Very," she agreed. "Thomas, he was like a virgin: I had to direct him in everything. He was so afraid that he might bruise me, and meanwhile I was dying there in his lap, so eager was I to have him." 

She took Thomas's hand, guiding him, recreating James's touch as she spoke. "I had him loosen my bodice, and I pulled my shift down, just enough. His palms are all callouses, I think from hauling line, and I moaned so loudly when they dragged across my breasts I'm sure the driver must have heard." 

Thomas followed her, obedient when she pulled shift and robe aside, baring her nipples again. He stroked his thumbs across the tight, pink peaks and smiled when she shivered. It did nothing for him, neither the sight nor the tactile reality of her breasts, but his dearest friend's pleasure always gladdened him, and here he imagined other hands, as masculine as his own, touching his body just as they had touched hers. 

Even when they had been newly married, and he had thought perhaps he could change for her, or find some hidden place within himself that would let him be a fitting husband for this woman, he had had to imagine. Always then it had been a struggle to attend to her while telling himself that a different body was beneath him or upon him. But she knew how to make it easy for him now, these days when they rarely shared a bed but openly discussed their lovers. She painted a picture for him in words, stoking his hunger for the man she could have and he could not.

"But I was wrong, Thomas," she told him. "When I had his prick out from his breeches, and I held myself on my knees over him, I knew that I was wrong." 

Her fingers flexed at her own thigh, and her breath caught, remembering. She pulled Thomas to her, kissed him roughly, and that was good, that had always been good; kissing her had never felt like a duty. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth, let her guide him there, too, let her tongue push into him. So easy to imagine another mouth, just as proper but made filthy with passion. Perhaps he could even find a taste of James there, his kisses lingering in Miranda's mouth.

When she pulled back it was just enough to speak, her words breathed over his lips. "I was wrong in my first impression. No virgin fucks like that."

He looked at her wide-eyed and imagined what it had felt like for her, to have James fucking her while she writhed in his lap, his white sailor's breeches rough between her thighs and growing wet from the juices of her cunt. What would feel like for _him_ , the stretch and deep burn of it, while his knees dug into the carriage bench and fierce green eyes bore into him. Despite the sleepy wine haze, his own cock strained in its restraints, and he pushed the heel of his hand against it, groaning at the pressure.

She sat back, her own color high, looking very pleased with herself. "Thomas … sleep here tonight?"

Immediately he nodded, and she turned to the mirror to finish her preparations while he stood to undress himself. Never were boots so difficult to contend with as when one's erection was diverting all flow of blood below the waist. He was in shirt and drawers by the time she had tied her hair into a loose braid and taken off her robe, and his shirt wasn't quite loose enough to hide his arousal from her knowing eye.

Together they moved about the room, dousing candles, and only a sliver of moonlight through the window provided light when they climbed into bed. He lay on his right side and she on her left, and she took his hand again and lay it on her thigh. When he tightened his grip and she gasped, he knew that she had bruises there. So she had succeeded in making James throw caution to the wind after all.

His own hips moved, a lazy thrust, enough room between the two of them that his still-covered cock rubbed only mattress and blankets. It wasn't enough, but he didn't need more, not yet. His Scheherazade was not done. 

"I forgot to mention," she said, her voice low and honey-sweet in the dark. "I fucked him here, too."

"Oh, God," Thomas moaned, and without a thought he pressed his face into the pillow, hoping he could find some trace of James's scent there. 

Miranda continued, relentless. "I thought I couldn't. I thought he would refuse. But men are so much easier to handle once you've made sure their cocks are satisfied. Don't you agree, husband?"

Her hand left his and moved further down, rucking up her shift before slipping between her thighs. He kept his hold on her hip, right where James had marked her. She raked her fingers through the folds of her cunt, the scent of her own arousal sharp. When she untied the string on his drawers and pulled his cock out beneath the covers, her fingers were wet.

Harder now, he thrust his prick into her palm, thinking of what she had said. Calloused hands, weathered and strong from a sailor's life -- her soft, delicate skin was nothing like what Thomas wanted, what she had had in this very bed just hours before. Cruelly, she held him loosely, her grip only a tease. 

"How did you have him?" he asked desperately, his need roughening his throat. "Did he undress for you? Did you ride him here?"

"No," Miranda said, and her hand left his cock, stroking over his hip the way he he touched her. "No, darling. I got him out of those clothes, left them there at the foot of the bed, and oh, he was glorious. Red hair and freckles all over, even on his thighs where his skin is pale. I wanted to use my mouth on him. My mouth watered for him."

Thomas pressed his face into the pillow, burying another moan there, and he couldn't stand it anymore. He let go his wife and took himself in hand, giving himself the firm, insistent strokes she wouldn't. In turn she let him go, and he could feel her shifting, spreading her own legs so she could rub her fingers against her sex. 

"What did he taste like?" Thomas asked, his breath loud and needy in the quiet night.

"I don't know. He wouldn't let me." Her voice sounded rough, frustration and urgency warring in her. "That impossible man, I took all my clothes off and went down on my knees before him and he wouldn't _let_ me. Told me I wasn't a _whore_."

She laughed, Thomas laughed, and she found his mouth unerringly and pressed another kiss on him. Her mouth was hot, and the pressure was almost bruising, her lips and tongue ungentle, as far from the obedient, proper wife as ever a man had asked God for. 

Remembering James she snarled, her teeth pressing against Thomas's lips before she withdrew. "I wanted to be. He was standing there, so gentle and polite, the first man besides you to insist I _wasn't_ a whore, and I wanted him to treat me like one of his dock-side girls. _Anything_ , if I could taste that delicious cock."

Though clouds had covered the moon and she couldn't see him, Thomas nodded fervent agreement. What would he have done if he had been there, on the floor and begging to be allowed to worship the gorgeous body before him? What would he have promised, if only James had let him perform that base act? It would have been so good for him; Thomas knew the skill of his own mouth, felt no shame when he sucked his lovers until they spent onto his tongue, felt satisfaction when they lay there shaking and he licked them clean. 

Beads of ejaculate welled at the tip of his own cock, and he rubbed them into his shaft, hand speeding as Miranda's own voice shook with ardor. "And do you know what he did, Thomas? All that gentleness and propriety, all that time spent telling me that he couldn't, that he didn't want me?" It was anger, lust, raw passion in all its forms that tightened her throat, sent her voice higher. Thomas could hear her building to her own peak. 

Nearly spitting in her anger, she told him, "He put me on this bed, and he took me like a dog takes a _bitch_." 

Thomas moaned, seeing it in his mind's eye. James above and behind her, his powerful body driving into her. Miranda on her hands and knees while that cock split her open, pushed her forward with every thrust. _Thomas_ on his hands and knees, ass stretched tight around James's cock. James's heavy balls in their tangle of red hair slapping against him while those pitiless hands dug bruises into his hips.

"I could have _killed_ him for holding back so long --" Miranda's voice broke on the last syllable, turned into a high keen. 

Thomas kicked the covers back, rolled onto his back. The room was suddenly freezing against his burning skin, and he jerked frantically at his cock, his hips moving needily, as he spilled his orgasm over his hand and splattered come onto his shirt. Roughly, he tugged at his balls, a snarl of his own in his throat, giving himself the rough treatment his _wife_ had enjoyed from the man _Thomas_ wanted, the man it was so _easy_ for her to have when Thomas never could, couldn't even _ask_ because the cost was too high, the chance of losing James's friendship too much --

He was a mess. Both of them were messes, Thomas and Miranda, sweating and panting in a room redolent with sex.

Weakly, he wiped his hand clean on his ruined shirt and let Miranda do the same. At her urging he took his clothes off and dropped them on the floor, something for the servants to find and wonder over. Surely it would reassure them, to see that the master and mistress of the house had shared passion in her bedroom, though he might have poor aim. 

Naked, he pulled the covers over himself again, and she snuggled up against his side. In her arms he shifted, wanting to be held; he rolled onto his side so that his back was to her, Miranda curled around him. Her warm body against his back was the assurance he was home, just as the smell of her perfume was. Her hand rested on his bare chest, a little sticky still with the sweetness of her cunt. 

He couldn't have everything he wanted, but what he had now was more than most men knew to dream of. It would be enough.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Me:** Time to write that plotty gen piece you've been wanting.
> 
>  **Also me:** The Hamiltons probably gossiped about the dudes they fucked.
> 
> Title comes from the groom's vows in the edition of the Book of Common Prayer that would have been in use when Thomas and Miranda married.


End file.
